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The Seven Questions Creationists Cannot Answer (I)

© Francois Tremblay

Creationists have a lot of supposed stumpers against Neo-Darwinism. None of them are based on any scientific fact. But what about Creationism ? Are there fundamental problems with Creationists ? Plenty. Here are the "seven questions Creationists cannot answer".

1. Is there evidence for your hypothesis ?

Creationists waste their time attacking the principles of Neo-Darwinism, and never present any evidence for their position. But even if, by some miracle, they managed to disprove Neo-Darwinism, they would have in no way proven the truth of their religion. As I pointed out in my article The Intellectual Poverty of Creationism, there are hundreds of alternatives besides Neo-Darwinism and Christian Creationism, including the Algonquin creation myth, the Shinto creation myth, the Yoruba creation myth, the Mayan creation myth, the Pawnee, Inuit, Mogollon, Hindu, and Zoroastrian creation myths, as well as other scientific hypothesis such as Special Creationism, Lamarckism, Neo-Lamarckism, Process Structuralism, Saltationism... and so on and so forth.

What could be counted as evidence for Creationism ? Well, if Creationists could agree on an actual formulation of Creationism, maybe we could make a list. Until then, we'll have to keep to generalities. Evidence that species pop out of nothing (see question 5) would be a good step, but spontaneous generation was disproven in 1859 by Louis Pasteur. We do not observe animals popping out of thin air, or out of the dirt, or out of rotting meat. Only evolution.

2. Has Creationism ever made a true prediction ?

Any good scientific theory can make predictions, either of what we will observe, or what we should find. If it cannot make such predictions, then it has nothing to do with reality. If it fails at its predictions, then it is false or incomplete.

Neo-Darwinism make predictions, and those predictions are confirmed with every archaeological discovery. All life on Earth is derived from common ancestors, and finding organisms without DNA would disprove that. Yet all lifeforms on Earth have DNA. All life on Earth is hierarchical, and both the morphological and molecular hierarchies converge. Our discovery of transitional forms follow this hierarchy : we have plenty of transitions between reptiles and birds and reptiles and mammals, for example, but none between, say, birds and mammals. If we did find such a form, it would be a problem for Neo-Darwinism !

We can explain why vestigial organs exist in a given species, by looking at the past of its genome. If whales were fishes instead of mammals, it would be rather hard to explain why they have vestigial legs. Indeed, those vestigial legs could be called the "smoking gun" of Neo-Darwinism. Or to take a previous example, we should not find mammals with vestigial feathers. There are millions of ways by which Neo-Darwinism could be falsified, and yet all the data we find confirm its obvious truth.